w dominated by a concept of dynamism replaced a world view dominated by static formalisms.
An important part of the turbulence was the American reception of Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. Powerful ideas about change accorded well with the atmosphere of relentless change in technology and human relations. On the other hand, American intellectual leaders were determined to resist the new Darwinian conception, or at least to fit it comfortably within an older ideological framework. Darwinism threatened the habits of thinking even of those Americans most knowledeable about it and most sympathetic to it.
Darwin described a natural world far more dependent on random processes than could be accommodated within traditional modes of describing and explaining biological processes. For Darwin, the present forms of the various plant and animal species result from a continuing struggle for existence. Because more forms come into existence in any area than the environment can support, only the fittest forms (species) will survive. The winners in the struggle for existence pass down their characteristics to succeeding generations. No two individual organisms come into the world exactly alike, and that the differences among organisms, however minute, are the basis of the struggle for existence. It is crucial to Darwin's theory, moreover, and to many of the objections to it, that the differences among organisms do not arise through the external agency of the environment, but within the organisms themselves (through heredity). Evolution that consists in the interaction of an inevitable variability with environmental conditions. It is a state of flux, the procession of mutable forms through an inconstant world.
By overturning the idea of natural species fixed by God, the Darwinian revolution in biology profoundly affected other spheres of thought and action. A scientifically consistent descri...